Month: April 2012

This week on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, the first in a 2-part series on leadership. And not a superficial treatment either. But a deep investigation into what it means to be a true leader here in the 21st Century.

Gone are the old values we once held so high, like charisma and conviction and coercion. It’s a new time, and it requires true leadership, not the pseudo leadership we see all around us today.

Only question is … what is true leadership anyway? The science of Analytical Trilogy is uniquely placed to answer that question.

Here’s an excerpt from our latest Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head program, Freedom and Leadership.

Take a look around at the critical situations facing we human beings, and it’s sobering. Maybe that’s why most of us don’t like looking too closely. It becomes overwhelming. “Can’t you talk about something else,” is how my mother often phrases this sense of overwhelm. The implication being that not talking about it makes it disappear.

An absurd rationale, of course, but one that’s rather common in our addicted-to-positivity society. In the science of psycho-socio-pathology elaborated at the International Society of Analytical Trilogy where our program originates, this is called an Inversion.

Seeing problems is a negative. You have to make lemonade with that mountain of lemons, after all. Problem? what problem? What we’ve got here is a heaven-sent opportunity, not a problem at all. That’s the common parlance.

But to really solve the problem, we have to forget about the inverted dictums of the motivational literature. There it is written that we need to forget the past and look to the future – exactly the polar opposite of what we should be doing. Real leaders, in truth, need to look very hard at the reasons we’re in the mess we’re in.

I remember the day it fully dawned on me that the path society was on was a dead end. I was on the train from Rhinebeck, NY to Toronto – a beautiful but tedious journey with only vestiges of the former romance of train travel to keep me company. I was settled in with snacks and bottled water and ample reading material to fill the long 10 hours or so ahead of me.

Or maybe it wasn’t a change as much as a recognition. T.S. Eliot spoke about how at the end of all our exploring we would arrive at where we started and know the place for the first time – and that perhaps comes closer to how I felt. It was like a recognition in Keppe’s writing of something I also knew to be true but had forgotten.

Keppe’s great book does that – reawakens our idealism and gives us a glimpse of the new society that’s possible. And all this can happen because Keppe helps disinvert us and get us back on track.